Exploring Biblical Womanhood with Dr. Beth Allison Barr

2021-08-23

Friends! You’re in for a treat today as we jump into a powerful discussion with my new friend, the brilliant Dr. Beth Allison Barr. Beth is an associate professor of history and associate dean of the Graduate School at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women’s history, and church history. She is the president of the Conference on Faith and History and is a member of Christians for Biblical Equality. And she has serious credentials, having written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post

Friends! You’re in for a treat today as we jump into a powerful discussion with my new friend, the brilliant Dr. Beth Allison Barr.

Beth is an associate professor of history and associate dean of the Graduate School at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women’s history, and church history. She is the president of the Conference on Faith and History and is a member of Christians for Biblical Equality. And she has serious credentials, having written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post, and Religion News Service, and is a regular contributor to The Anxious Bench, the popular Patheos website on Christian history.

Beth joins me on the show today to talk about her latest book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, and the importance of knowing the history of what women have been through. We also dive into the importance of understanding the context and culture of the day when reading the Bible, and the cost of the reformation for evangelical women.

Listen to learn more about:

How to become more biblically literate by approaching the Bible with contextual understanding of the day when it was written
What the Reformation cost women in terms of opportunities and society norms
Why it’s important to understand our history even in religious contexts
Junea, the first female apostle, and how she was written out of the Bible.

Favorite quotes:

Biblical womanhood is one of the most recent manifestations of the patriarchy.

I think the cost of the reformation for evengelacial women is that it made only one right way for us to be Godly. And that was to be married with children under the authority of our husbands.

Culture shapes the way we view women and men in a way that women and men are not shaped in the Bible.

There was a wage gap in the medieval world. Women made about 71 cents to the dollar, if we put it in modern terms. And here we are in the 21st century and women make about 75 cents to the dollar compared with men for doing the same jobs. I think that is a very powerful example of something going on in which women's work is not valued in the same way as men. That women are seen as not as not quite as good as men around them.

In this episode I answer this question: